This section describes the basic Dired commands to operate on one file
or several files. All of these commands are capital letters; all of
them use the minibuffer, either to read an argument or to ask for
confirmation, before they act. All of them give you several ways to
specify which files to manipulate:

If you give the command a numeric prefix argument n, it operates
on the next n files, starting with the current file. (If n
is negative, the command operates on the -n files preceding
the current line.)

Otherwise, if some files are marked with `*', the command operates
on all those files.

Otherwise, the command operates on the current file only.

Here are the file-manipulating commands that operate on files in this
way. (Some other Dired commands, such as ! and the `%'
commands, also use these conventions to decide which files to work on.)

C newRET

Copy the specified files (dired-do-copy). The argument new
is the directory to copy into, or (if copying a single file) the new
name.
If dired-copy-preserve-time is non-nil, then copying with
this command sets the modification time of the new file to be the same
as that of the old file.

D

Delete the specified files (dired-do-delete). Like the other
commands in this section, this command operates on the marked
files, or the next n files. By contrast, x
(dired-expunge) deletes all flagged files.

R newRET

Rename the specified files (dired-do-rename). The argument
new is the directory to rename into, or (if renaming a single
file) the new name.
Dired automatically changes the visited file name of buffers associated
with renamed files so that they refer to the new names.

H newRET

Make hard links to the specified files (dired-do-hardlink). The
argument new is the directory to make the links in, or (if making
just one link) the name to give the link.

S newRET

Make symbolic links to the specified files (dired-do-symlink).
The argument new is the directory to make the links in, or (if
making just one link) the name to give the link.

M modespecRET

Change the mode (also called "permission bits") of the specified files
(dired-do-chmod). This uses the chmod program, so
modespec can be any argument that chmod can handle.

G newgroupRET

Change the group of the specified files to newgroup
(dired-do-chgrp).

O newownerRET

Change the owner of the specified files to newowner
(dired-do-chown). (On most systems, only the superuser can do
this.)
The variable dired-chown-program specifies the name of the
program to use to do the work (different systems put chown in
different places).

P commandRET

Print the specified files (dired-do-print). You must specify the
command to print them with, but the minibuffer starts out with a
suitable guess made using the variables lpr-command and
lpr-switches (the same variables that lpr-buffer uses;
see section Hardcopy Output).

Z

Compress the specified files (dired-do-compress). If the file
appears to be a compressed file already, it is uncompressed instead.

Search all the specified files for the regular expression regexp
(dired-do-search).
This command is a variant of tags-search. The search stops at
the first match it finds; use M-, to resume the search and find
the next match. See section Searching and Replacing with Tags Tables.

Q fromRETtoRET

Perform query-replace-regexp on each of the specified files,
replacing matches for from (a regular expression) with the string
to (dired-do-query-replace).
This command is a variant of tags-query-replace. If you exit the
query replace loop, you can use M-, to resume the scan and replace
more matches. See section Searching and Replacing with Tags Tables.

One special file-operation command is +
(dired-create-directory). This command reads a directory name and
creates the directory if it does not already exist.